Free Republic

Failed CNN boss Jeff Zucker still wants to stay in the media game. To that end he is leading an offer to buy the bankrupt British publishing group behind the Daily Telegraph newspaper and Spectator magazine. The New York Post reports Zucker, the chief executive of Abu Dhabi-backed investment group RedBird IMI, is ready to pitch $750 million to the Barclay family that would allow them to repay their nearly $1.4 billion debt to Lloyds Banking Group. RedBird, a venture capital firm that has $1 billion in capital, would then have an option to convert the loan secured against the...

FACEBOOK was accused of blocking an advert satirising Joe Biden in a free speech row... ...The front cover featured the headline Six More Years but showed Mr Biden holding up only five fingers. Editor Fraser Nelson revealed he asked the company to think again but the plea was rejected.... ...A spokesperson for Facebook last night said: "Anyone who wants to run an ad that's political has to be authorised....

Hunter Biden just paid over $1 million in back taxes for income he never claimed, but which was found in his emails — the ones from his laptop that had been dismissed by the mainstream media as Russian disinformation. The FBI is conducting an ongoing criminal investigation into Hunter’s business activities based on the contents of the laptop. It was only the Bureau’s use of the laptop as evidence that finally forced the New York Times this month to admit that what it said last year was false. See, as the New York Post broke the story that a laptop...

The great American journalist and satirist PJ O’Rourke has died. He contributed a number of articles to The Spectator over the years.

Sources close to and within the intelligence community tell Cockburn that Babbitt was actually shot by a member of then-vice president Mike Pence’s protective detail. The VP’s detail, of course, is provided by US Secret Service, not the Capitol Police. One person asserted to Cockburn over drinks in DC that this is ‘basically an open secret’ in the intelligence community. Law enforcement sources suggested to Cockburn that the Capitol Police Department and Department of Justice have publicly identified the shooter as a Capitol Police officer in order to protect the reputation of the Secret Service. Cockburn also wonders if this...

It's time to unite. Trump-Cruz in 2016. Yet here is the headline from the New York Times. Donald Trump or Ted Cruz? Republicans Argue Over Who Is Greater Threat The story reads in part: snip Say again? "The Republicans who dominate the right-leaning magazines, journals and political groups can live with Mr. Cruz..." Speaking for myself - I can more than "live with" Ted Cruz. In fact, if Donald Trump wins this nomination, I believe Ted Cruz should be to Trump as George H.W. Bush was to Reagan or Lyndon Johnson was to John F. Kennedy - the runner-up whose...

Jeff [rey Lord] is calling for a Trump-Cruz ticket. Maybe Jeff didn't get the memo, but Trump has been arguing that Cruz isn't qualified to be President because of his Canadian birth. In which case, if Cruz isn't eligible to be President then how can he be eligible to be VP?

John Boehner is a good man in a hard place. He has served in public office as a lifelong conservative, not a RINO. His position on the Obama tax increases has been better than almost any other Republican who has been speaking out lately, given the Obama/Democrat election victories -- close loopholes and deductions for $800 billion in new revenue over a decade, but no increases in rates. But face it. Boehner is no match for Obama on the national stage. He cannot press the economic arguments articulately. He does not have a compelling personality. Obama is running circles around...

Couric Diminishes Gov. Palin By The Prowler Published 9/26/2008 12:08:10 AM CBS New anchor Katie Couric ordered staff to drop all references to "Governor" or "Gov." from her interview with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. When a staff member pointed out that in other venues, Couric and CBS News had referred to Governor Palin's opponent, Joe Biden, using his title of "Senator" or the abbreviation, Couric, according to a CBS News editorial aide, sought approval from CBS News management to drop the "Governor" reference during her broadcast interview with Palin that began on Wednesday night. "It's not true," said another CBS...

This review is taken from the November 2006 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to the monthly print edition, click here. The Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders by Keith Olbermann (Wiley, 267 pages, $22.95) GEORGE M. COHAN USED TO SAY, explaining why he always refused to record his songs, "You gotta see me to appreciate me." The same might be said of Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC's Countdown. There are performers and there are writers and never the twain should meet. Usually they don't because they are such different species that Nature herself keeps them...

Ouch....

Jack Kelly had a great editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this morning, in which he discusses the embarrassing failures of terrorists in Iraq and the inevitability of complete victory. In an interview with The Spectator earlier in February, Lt. Col. Jim Stockmoe, chief intelligence officer for the First Infantry Division, compared one story with the movie “Dumb and Dumber:” "There were three brothers down in Baghdad who had a mortar tube and were firing into the Green Zone," Stockmoe said. "They were storing the mortar rounds in the car engine compartment and the rounds got overheated. Two of these clowns...

Magazine casts sex scandal spellWed December 01, 2004 04:36 AM ET By Peter Graff LONDON (Reuters) - A 175-year-old, right-wing political journal may not sound all that sexy. But an irresistible romantic mojo is bubbling away at one august publication, causing havoc in the Houses of Parliament. In a country where adultery and politics sometimes seem to go together like fish and chips, everyone is wondering, what on earth is so sexy about The Spectator? For those who have lost track of the bedroom antics of the political elite, The Spectator is the magazine at the centre of no...

A few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto containing 15 pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, 'To expel all Jews from our country.' It is in the west of Ukraine that support is strongest for the man who is being...

Politics in the United States is as polarised as I can remember in my lifetime. November’s election is shaping up to be as close fought as the 2000 contest, but with war and global Islamic terrorism mixed into the brew, we all feel as involved as the American public. The whole world is dangling on a hanging chad. ‘What’s all this nonsense about salt being bad for you?’ While the majority of Europeans and the entire Labour party minus Downing Street are rooting for Kerry, what is more disquieting is the support of some British Conservative MPs for the Democrat...

This year is the centenary year of the Entente Cordiale, and I intend to celebrate it by buying a house in France (the acte authentique, the final signing, takes place later this month) and, in the not very distant future, by living there. Whether this will improve Anglo–French relations remains to be seen. France is no terrestrial paradise, but I know from experience of living abroad that other country’s blemishes do not affect you in the same way as your own country’s blemishes, which weigh heavily on your soul. You can observe the failings of foreign politicians with amusement and...

JERUSALEM POST OWNERS RESIGN; FACE CORRUPTION CHARGES Post To Be Sold, Management Reshuffled Jerusalem Post Publisher Tom Rose, Editor Bret Stephens To Be Replaced By SETH SUTEL, AP Business Writer New York-----November 17........ Under heavy pressure from investors, Conrad Black will step down as chief executive of Hollinger International Inc., publisher of the Jerusalem Post and Chicago Sun-Times, and the company may be sold after an internal investigation found that fees had been improperly paid to Black and other senior executives. Several other executives are also leaving Hollinger as part of a management shakeup the company announced early Monday. David...

Ben Stein proffers advice tinged with humorBy Michael Pucci - Assistant Arts & Entertainment EditorNovember 11, 2003 Ben Stein, dry humorist and political commentator, offered important life lessons to a standing room-only audience in Hamilton Hall auditorium on Monday night."Almost nothing happens in life that you can't either profit from or learn from," he said.Dressed in a suit and wearing gray tennis shoes, the unlikely celebrity delivered a compelling, humorous and emotional 50-minute speech to a receptive crowd of more than 500 people.Stein, a graduate of Columbia University, where he majored in economics, and valedictorian of the class of 1970...

Focus is on photographer with an eye for cheerleaders BY STU POSPISIL LINCOLN - Metro Conference athletic directors and the Nebraska School Activities Association will be watching their high school basketball sidelines more closely after Omaha police detained a 74-year-old man for training a camera on high school cheerleaders. Omaha Marian Athletic Director Jim Miller said Wednesday that cheerleaders from his school became uncomfortable because of the man's apparent picture-taking at a Jan. 30 girls basketball game at Omaha South. Miller said the girls alerted Marian's dean of students, who told South administrators. School officials called police, who interviewed the...

My life beyond the paleTwenty years ago Roger Scruton established the Salisbury Review — and almost at once he became a pariah. It is 20 years since the Salisbury Group (a small gathering of old-fashioned Tories, informally chaired by the Marquess of Salisbury, and dedicated to the political vision of his ancestor, the great prime minister) entrusted me with the task of establishing and editing a review, having raised £5,000 among themselves for this purpose. I had just published The Meaning of Conservatism, a somewhat Hegelian defence of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers....